


Quelle Dommage

by indescribablehorror



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Brainwashing, Character Study, introspective
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-13
Updated: 2017-12-13
Packaged: 2019-02-14 07:07:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13002486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indescribablehorror/pseuds/indescribablehorror
Summary: An introspective look into Amelie's brainwashing and how her whole world has changed since then.





	Quelle Dommage

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys fucking forgot that im a writer who writes things bc i just started a quarter system and my grades are hurting real bad

Winter, light snow in a French metropolis, so packed with holiday stress and extended family, anyone could slip through unnoticed. A small cemetery so quiet it looms foreboding on the outskirts of the city. The cold is enough to have friends and lovers huddle closer as they walk. It does not chill to the bone. It is a child’s Christmas dream, the perfect temperature to have snow. The white covers everything, so fresh it conceals all dirt and grime. It’s as if the snow falls just to give a clean slate to everything.  
I don’t know why I am here. It seems my mind races with foreign thoughts these days. Gabe and Sombra have gone for their fun, so I am left all to my own. My blood sings. A pounding makes its way to my ears. What stupidity, a single name on a headstone. What am I to make of it?  
His headstone is simple. Gérard Lacroix. Birthdate and Death date. The irony is that a man cunning enough to scare Talon unravels to such a simple resting place. If I look at the name engraved on the stone too long everything goes blank. Monsieur Lacroix is fuzzy in my mind. I know the facts of my relation to him, but I don’t, at least, not most of the time. The harder I think the more distorted everything becomes. What is this rock slab to me?  
What a strange man Gérard was. I know at some point I loved him so. He was so afraid when Amélie was gone, he nearly cried while clutching me after I had returned. He couldn’t tell the two sides apart. I think he enjoyed his final two weeks with Amélie. If only he had known. If he woke up then… No, I killed him to live. Free from love and marriage, liberty from everything of my time before. He needed to die.  
He was a fool to fight so hard against something unbeatable. He was a fool who was on the wrong side. He could have lived if he were smarter. If he had noticed me sooner.  
Before I existed, she loved Gérard. I took Gérard from Overwatch, I took Gérard from her.  
That night was lively. Gérard and Amélie both died in that room that night. I only exist because of his death. Because of their deaths. I was christened in blood and tears of the widow I made. Sheets stained with bloody hands and I stared at the moon and ran into the night.  
Red like his blood or red like love, a rose is all I thought to bring. Why would I need a gift for the dead? Such a pitiful singular flower will surely freeze overnight, nothing about this is rational, but I doubt that rationality is what brought me here tonight. I place a single rose onto the dirt of his grave and return to watching, carving out the letters of his stone with my eyes.  
Talon greeted me with open arms. The prodigal agent. A perfect job. I return from each mission and they absolve me. Guilt weighs no measure on me, I am more useful to Talon than I would have ever been to anyone or thing in my old life.  
As I killed Gérard my heart lit up with something, and I knew when I returned to Talon that that was what it felt to be alive.  
Early on Amélie’s ghost still haunted me. Talon helped me fix that quickly. The ballerina and wife is long gone. I dance no more. Gérard is dead and I am the one who sealed his fate.  
Those fools in Overwatch see Amélie. They know nothing. I am not her. I will tell you about the death of Amélie Lacroix. I only exist because of death. I am not dead, but I exist only through death. I killed the first two together. I have made countless others since then. Gérard and Amélie aren’t special.  
Those who remain in Overwatch look at me and see her. They believe that we are indivisible. That somewhere I am Amélie Lacroix. I am Amelie but I am not the Amélie they knew. I am Amélie because that was my name even before I became myself, this person. I killed Amélie Lacroix. I am Amélie Lacroix. I am Widowmaker. I work for Talon. I killed Gérard, the love of my previous life. Ana, no longer the great challenger she once was, always fills me with such contempt. She knows nothing of Gérard. He was not a fool to love me. Amélie and I are different, same body, same mind, but we are a shared life between two individual people. Ana knows nothing of Gérard. She knows nothing of our time together. I am Widowmaker, not Amélie. I’m not a wife nor a ballerina.  
Unsure of most, all I know is this truth.  
When I was a little girl I feared spiders, but I know the truth, we are more alike now that ever. When I was a little girl my father and mother took me to a ballet class, and I rose and shone, a true star of the stage. They told me I would light up the world. I don’t shine on stage anymore. I truly shine when I go for the kill.  
In a different world I did ballet. Once I had been Odette and Odile. In this world, I am only a villain. I once knew love, I know it no longer. Even the echoes of the stage no longer stirs me. Pointe shoes are unnecessary and frivolous. In the stillness, I raise myself. I feel no rush on pointe, a grande jeté, chaînés, pirouettes, I continue down the habitual motions. Not even a brief lull, or the slightest fluttering in my chest. I know my love is dead.  
I do a new performance now. A new rush comes and sings, screams inside me. How much do I truly know? I cannot say. In the cold of winter I hear him call.  
Mid winter, I travel home and I see him, Gérard. His headstone is well-kept by someone. I can no longer tell if my desire to see him is Amélie, or if it is to feel something. This stupid stone haunts me.  
Quotidienne doldrum arouses nothing in me, but when I look through the scope, place my finger on the trigger, I feel everything. I feel life itself. What gives me life takes it from others, an irony so drastic I’d think it would have been written by any of the great french writers I had to read in school. Philosophers this, writers that, it’s all nonsense in the end. Why should the words of others have any impact on this life?  
What impact did Gérard have? I don’t think it even matters anymore. He is dead. Overwatch is not what it used to be. All his work unraveled so quickly.  
How much snow is necessary to hide all his mistakes? Enough at least to bury his grave. He dug it for himself. I guess I owe it to him, for making me who I am today.  
I know what Talon did to me. I remember it all. I remember Gérard’s face and I wish I could erase the pain. I remember Gérard’s shout and I wish I could still feel something. I remember when the tips of my fingers began turning blue it was when the feeling of heaviness washed away. Without feeling the hot or the cold, my world reached equilibrium. I looked in a mirror and I was myself, I was not her. I knew then that I was to be Talon’s weapon. They took the broken pieces and built me into something better. “You will change the world, Amélie.” And with my genesis, I began to break and build the world in Talon’s image.


End file.
